As we gear into work-mode, following a very long vacation, I thought I would fire off a quick series of post summarizing some of the past weeks more relevant papers, reports and blogposts. Here's the first one.

Building resilience in the Horn of Africa region

Vinod Thomas, the director general and senior vice-president of the Independent Evaluation Group within the World Bank, talks about how we can build resilience in the Horn of Africa region against severe drought.

He highlights several steps for building resilience in the region - the development of better early warning systems, flexible social safety nets for the most vulnerable groups, improving farmers access to drought-resistant crops and to introduce effective small-scale water harvesting technologies. Read the full story over at PovertyMatters blog.

Climate data bringing benefits to Senegals farmers

SciDev.Net reports on how a project in Senegal (InfoClim) is helping bridge the gap between technology and farming communities, by collecting and sharing climate information with vulnerable populations, particularly farmers, to help them adjust their sowing, cultivation and other dates to suit the current climate. Importantly, it seems that bridging actors are important in holding together the reliable networks between researchers and rural communities that underlie the success of the project.

A social well-being approach to the global fisheries crisis

Mark Gibson at Breaching the Blue reports on a recent paper in Global Environmental Change (Coulthard, S., Johnson, D., & McGregor, J. (2011). Poverty, sustainability and human wellbeing: A social wellbeing approach to the global fisheries crisis Global Environmental Change, 21 (2), 453-463 DOI: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2011.01.003) on the human dimensions of successful fisheries management. The paper is a nice review, and critique, of how fisheries management policies are very often dominated by biological and economic frameworks that ignore the social and cultural dimensions of fisheries.